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Best of the Bots Customize Content to Meet a User's Needs By Don Barker
Alper K. Caglayan, President and co-founder of Open Sesame, is a pioneer in intelligent agent technology. In 1993, his company delivered the first user interface learning agent for the Apple Mac. Although it didn't enjoy wide acceptance, Alper drew from this experience to develop a much more refined application, one which now enables companies to personalize their Web sites for each user without requiring any extra effort on the user's part. Learn Sesame, released in September of 1997, is designed to learn your habits and interests unobtrusively, by quietly monitoring the choices you make when visiting a Web site. As you browse a site, each click sends information to the program, which it uses to construct a personal profile. The next time you visit the site, Learning Sesame works with a dynamic page server to present you with personalized content based on information gathered from your previous visit(s). For example, the eGenie application, at Open Sesame, lets you explore According to Alper, entertainment is just one of the Web applications of Learn Sesame. It is also being applied in such areas as the financial sector, customer support, electronic newspapers, and virtual communities (e.g., iVillage) to tailor content to individual user preferences. Unlike other custom content agents (e.g., WiseWire and Firefly), Learn Sesame does not use collaborative-filtering (community opinions) to shape content recommendations. Alper believes that you can learn more about the preferences of people by analyzing what they actually do at a Web site than asking them to rate items or answer questionnaires. In fact, as many Web site owner's have discovered, that even getting people to register is hard sell. Thus, Learn Sesame's ability to collect personal information, without the need to fill out bothersome questionnaires, appears to offer a much more attractive means to profile users without intruding on their surfing experience. However, for some people, the idea of a "stealth-like" technology tracking their online behavior might pose some privacy concerns. Alper, and the rest of the folks at Open Sesame, are especially sensitive to these concerns. The company belongs to the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) group dealing with privacy issues and supports strong protection of the individual's right to privacy online. To make sure your privacy is respected, Learn Sesame comes with an "opt-out" option that lets you elect not to have your preferences added to a company's database. Learn Sesame is modular in design and consists of a three-tier architecture, as
depicted in Figure 2. The product also comes with several add-ons, including a personalized push system to deliver custom content to subscribers, an Ad system to target advertisements to interested users, and a smart report system to provide up-to-date statistics. Learn Sesame currently runs on the Windows NT platform, however, the company plans to make the product available for Silicon Graphics' Irix and Sun Solaris platforms in upcoming months. Alper recommends that you run Learn Sesame on a separate machine from your Web server. For medium-sized Web enterprises, the Learn Sesame machine can also contain your company database. Learn Sesame supports VBScript, JavaScript, ActiveX, Java, C, C++, and Visual Basic. Nonetheless, Alper stresses that installing and maintaining their product only requires a basic understanding of a scripting language like VBScript or JavaScript. Support for the more sophisticated languages, like Java or C++, is there to provide an additional level of customization for those who can and want to use it. All-in-all, Learn Sesame provides a convenient, powerful, and safe way for businesses to learn the interests of individual users nonintrusively. And, as any astute business person knows, offering personal service is the key to attracting and retaining customers. This intelligent agent technology has the potential of personalizing a Web site visitor's experience in a very efficient manner. If you are ready to enrich your Web experience, just say Open Sesame!
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What, if like the Arabian Nights,
you could use the magic words "Open Sesame!" to unlock the hidden treasures of
the Web? Well, that's exactly what the makers of Open Sesame's intelligent agent
technology have in mind. Like a genie awaiting to grant your every wish, Open Sesame
watches your actions and personalizes your Web experience without the need for specifying
your preferences.
The first module, Ambassador,
interacts with your Web server, dynamic page package, and content database, to record the
user's clicks. The second module, Knowledge Manager, controls the traffic between
the Ambassador, the Learning Engine, and Learn Sesame's own ODBC databases. The third
module, Learning Engine, uses attribute analysis to analyze a user's actions and
generate a interest profile for that user. 
